| Many reference books, including pedagogical grammars, have treated the definite article uniquely as a part of a system of determiners. Even though these studies reveal valuable information regarding the uses of the, they represent only a partial view of the uses and functions of the article in language use. This dissertation approaches the study of highly frequent function words, and more specifically, the definite article, from a corpus-linguistics perspective, considering the fact that, many times, the is a required component of a noun phrase, rather than a product of choice among a set of articles. At the same time as it investigates the phraseological functions of the in academic discourse, this dissertation analyzes methodological issues related to the study of highly frequent function words, including tools and techniques that can be used to manage massive amounts of data generated by the extraction of highly frequent words.; The chapters that compose this dissertation approach the study of highly frequent words from a variety of angles, including (a) methods to analyze highly frequent words, (b) collocational frameworks containing the definite article in academic discourse, (c) use of the the the as a hesitation device in academic spoken English, and (d) shell bundles containing the definite article (i.e., the fact that and the idea that).; Analyses and results provide further evidence to the idiom principle (Sinclair, 1999), which proposes that words tend to co-occur forming fixed and semi-fixed phrases, which are constantly repeated by language users to perform a number of communicative functions.; INDEX WORDS: Corpus Linguistics, Function Words, Definite Article, Collocations, Frequency, Idiom Principle, Shell Bundles, Repetitions, Phraseology. |
